About a week has passed since I officially started the PhD program in Iowa State’s Mechanical Engineering department. In that brief time, I’ve gotten a better idea of how the whole graduate student arrangement works and how it differs from my time as an undergraduate.

Needless to say, my opinion of the whole undergraduate experience is pretty lackluster. Sure, you get a degree, but after a few years of having acquired it, I’m of the opinion that it’s the equivalent of high school for the professional working world. Graduate school seems a bit more formal and adult-like in that sense and a whole lot less organized. The best way I can describe it is that it gives the impression of being more “job-like.” You are a “student,” but you have to figure things out on your own—sort of like when you are a transfer student at a new university.

So what have I learned so far? It’s overwhelmingly clear that an ever-present focus in graduate school is the need for funding. Someone needs to pay for your time at the university, and unless that is self-funded, it’s on the student to figure out where they’re going to get money from. From chatting with some people in the department, there are basically two options for PhD students:

  • Obtain a teaching assistantship and get paid by the ME department: This involves working in a lab and teaching students how to do their lab work (then grading their assignments) or teaching students the theoretical part of their classes and helping grade exams. You essentially become an extension of the classes taught by professors, relieving them of tasks they can’t manage due to the volume of students.

  • Obtain a research assistantship and get paid to do research. In this case, you have to make friends with a professor, and they hire you to do research in their lab. The way this apparently works is that professors essentially get contracted to research a topic, and the grad students get subcontracted to perform that work. If the professors don’t have any contracts, there’s no money to pay the grad students. The actual term is “funding,” but in my opinion, it’s just an indirect way to say someone got paid to do something.

Between these two options, the research assistantship is seen as the most appealing, as a PhD “student” can dedicate all their time to research that advances their thesis. Teaching assistantships, on the other hand, are just work, and time invested into them does nothing to further one’s personal investigations. Since the entire point of a PhD is to get a degree at the end, perhaps the most important objective at the start of a PhD is to get a research assistantship and forget teaching.

Unfortunately, getting a research assistantship is no guarantee against teaching. Since research assistantships are linked to time-limited funding, a professor can only pay their students for a limited amount of time. Moreover, since that funding is associated with a particular research topic, if the questions regarding that topic are satisfied, then there’s no reason for funding to continue. In practice, this means that a PhD student can get a research assistantship for a couple of years, and once it runs out, they will have to study something else if funding is available, or they will have to teach again.

So this is a real quagmire and an ever-changing scenario. Funding is never guaranteed, and “students” have to adapt and somehow stitch together a thesis from these experiences. In fact, it is highly probable that a student will have to work on at least two separate topics, as a PhD program (in the U.S.) can last around five years, and funding tends to last between one and four. These intervals don’t fully cover a PhD program, so a student will have to adapt to the changes in funding sources.

Money is the Name of the Game

From the above information, it’s clear that money is a primary focus in a PhD program, and other concerns are somehow appended onto this necessity. The division of labor is such that the university is essentially responsible for providing the physical location to perform research. They ensure things like buildings, lab equipment, a bureaucratic structure to procure and organize students, and money by offering classes to undergraduate and master’s students.

Research-oriented professors are then employed by the university to obtain research funds to run their labs. They go around and procure money from some interested party (likely a government agency or a large private company) to investigate a particular field. This means that, from a practical perspective, a professor is really more focused on getting “clients” to pay for research than on the actual details of the research itself. Since their job is to find money, the professors offload the actual work of research onto their graduate “students.” This makes sense, since obtaining funds for research is not an easy task, and you have to convince the party making the investment that their funds will go toward something useful. Like in any business, attracting clients is essential, and the professors seem to play that role.

The graduate students are then intermediaries in this process. They are the employees of the professors who perform the actual research, while in the meantime, the professor is finding another source of funding. The university takes a cut of what the professor makes to finance its own expenses, and the cycle repeats. It’s not entirely clear to me if this process is the same for all areas of research, but at least this is how mechanical engineering (and engineering in general) seems to operate. It makes sense. Engineering is a practical field, so it’s to be expected that research should be just as goal-oriented—some group gets paid to perform a task, and here are the deliverables.

The Position of Students and Grinding Out a Degree

What I have laid out so far is focused on the perspective of an incoming PhD student. That distorts the perspective held by master’s students, whose program is different. In their case, it seems they are either self-funded or a company pays them to get the degree. In any case, they can focus much less on research and mostly have to complete their courses to get their diploma.

This is not the case for a PhD student. The bureaucratic requirements are more extensive. You have to submit multiple research papers that need to turn into a thesis, which is then reviewed by a committee of professors to see if you’re good enough to pass. All the while, you must take a required number of courses and pass some difficult departmental exams. Evidently, this is a bunch of crap that will pile up on someone if they aren’t paying attention. And then there is the ever-present prospect of acquiring funding. So it’s a real crapshoot to get the degree. However, a more scrupulous analysis leads me to think the diploma itself is really just an inconsequential prize at the end. The process of juggling all these requirements sounds more like professional training, where the PhD program is like an introductory job in research rather than a means to get a job like an undergraduate degree. Which makes sense if you consider that an undergraduate degree serves that purpose—you can apply for jobs after getting one, so a PhD program is just another job you can sign up for.

Conclusions

I’m not sure this “job-like” interpretation of graduate school is the correct one, but it certainly feels psychologically calming and reassuring. I think there are a lot of floaty arguments out there that promote the experience as a way to further the realms of human knowledge, pushing the frontier of what is known forward and whatnot. This is certainly a lofty way of perceiving things, but I can’t help but feel it disregards the practical aspects of graduate school—mainly that it’s a way to further a career path that ultimately leads to some type of employment. So like undergrad, it’s a means to an end to make a living. The idealistic interpretation of graduate school lends itself far more to being hurt emotionally if one isn’t careful; it’s just not clear how grubbing for money to pay for school has anything to do with some lofty goal of furthering human development. Somehow, it probably does, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as impactful as our naive, child-like egos might otherwise like. Reality is just generally less romantic, which is fine. That’s just how it is. Appreciate the good that it has and move on with life.